Don't blench! Here come the F.A.N.T.O.D.S.!

Thanks to Izzy, I've made it my goal the past many years to read 25 new books. However, I quickly realized that that goal was much too conservative for a bookseller, so thus far this year, I've read 21 new books.

The latest one, The Portable Obituary, seemed like a good idea at the time, but as I read about the deaths of many famous people, I became increasingly annoyed by the author's (or maybe his copyeditor's) sloppy usage and straining to make weak or snarky jokes.

Throughout the book, for example, anyone who committed suicide by hanging is said to have "hung himself." Hanged, as a past tense and a past participle of hang, is used in the sense of " to put to death by hanging."

In the account of the death of Julio Gallo, who mass-produced inexpensive wines, we read, "In 1993, at age eighty-three he died while surveying his vineyard in Modesto, California, after his Jeep overturned when it hit a ripple in the road. (Ripple was another Gallo brand once popular with the alcoholic, the destitute, and college students.)"

But I digress. I recently picked up a book on word origins, and the first thing I read was that the word cop began as an acronym for "constable on patrol." And then I started thinking about the supposed origin of the f-word: "for unlawful carnal knowledge" or "fornication under consent of king" back in the Middle Ages. From there it was only a short leap to packages of manure stamped "ship high in transit" so they wouldn't produce methane gas when wet and blow up the ship.

And then I got cranky and had to lie down with a cold rag on my head. I'm expected to make a complete recovery.